On Saturday morning the call from the No. 10 Private Secretary came through. Ted wanted to see me. When I went in to the Cabinet Room I began by congratulating him on his victory. But not much time was spent on pleasantries. He was as ever brusque and businesslike, and he offered me the job of Education Secretary, which I accepted.
I went back to the flat at Westminster Gardens with Denis and we drove to Lamberhurst.*
Sadly my father was not alive to share the moment. Shortly before his death in February, I had gone up to Grantham to see him. My stepmother, Cissy, whom he had married several years earlier and with whom he had been very happy, was constantly at his bedside. While I was there, friends from the church, business, local politics, the Rotary and bowling club, kept dropping in ‘just to see how Alf was’. I hoped that at the end of my life I too would have so many good friends.
I understand that my father had been listening to me as a member of a panel on a radio programme just before he died. He never knew that I would become a Cabinet minister, and I am sure that he never imagined I would eventually become Prime Minister. He would have wanted these things for me because politics was so much a part of his life and because I was so much his daughter. But nor would he have considered that political power was the most important or even the most effective thing in life. In searching through my papers to assemble the material for this volume I came across some of my father’s loose sermon notes slipped into the back of my sixth-form chemistry exercise book.
Men, nations, races or any particular generation cannot be saved by ordinances, power, legislation. We worry about all this, and our faith becomes weak and faltering. But all these things are as old as the human race – all these things confronted Jesus 2,000 years ago … This is why Jesus had to come.
My father lived these convictions to the end.
* A Balance of Power (1986), p.42.
* In Place of Strife was the – in retrospect ironically chosen – title of a Labour White Paper of 1969 which proposed a range of union reforms. The proposals had to be abandoned due to internal opposition within the Cabinet and the Labour Party, led by Jim Callaghan.
* We had bought ‘The Mount’, a mock-Tudor house with a large garden in Lamberhurst, near Tunbridge Wells, in 1965. In 1972 we sold it, and bought the house in Flood Street (Chelsea) which would be my home until in 1979 I moved into 10 Downing Street.
The Department of Education 1970–1974
ON MONDAY 22 JUNE 1970 I arrived at the Department of Education and Science (DES) in its splendid old quarters in Curzon Street. I was met by the Permanent Secretary, Bill (later Sir William) Pile and the outgoing Permanent Secretary, Sir Herbert Andrew. They gave me a warm greeting and showed me up to my impressive office. It was all too easy to slip into the warm water of civil service respect for ‘the minister’, but I was very conscious that hard work lay ahead. I was generally satisfied with the ministerial team I had been allotted: one friendly, one hostile and one neutral. My old friend Lord Eccles, as Paymaster-General, was responsible for the Arts. Bill Van Straubenzee, a close friend of Ted’s, dealt with Higher Education. Lord Belstead answered for the department in the Lords. I was particularly pleased that David Eccles, a former Minister of Education, was available, though installed in a separate building, to give me private advice based on his knowledge of the department.
My difficulties with the department, however, were not essentially about personalities. Nor did they stem from the opposition between my own executive style of decision-making and the more consultative style to which they were accustomed. Indeed, by the time I left I was aware that I had won a somewhat grudging respect because I knew my own mind and expected my decisions to be carried out promptly and efficiently. The real problem was – in the widest sense – one of politics.
The ethos of the DES was self-righteously socialist. For the most part, these were people who retained an almost reflex belief in the ability of central planners and social theorists to create a better world. There was nothing cynical about this. Years after many people in the Labour Party had begun to have their doubts, the educationalists retained a sense of mission. Equality in education was not only the overriding good, irrespective of the practical effects of egalitarian policies on particular schools; it was a stepping stone to achieving equality in society, which was itself an unquestioned good. It was soon clear to me that on the whole I was not among friends.
My difficulties with the civil service were compounded by the fact that we had been elected in 1970 with a set of education policies which were perhaps less clear than they appeared. During the campaign I had hammered away at seven points:
a shift of emphasis onto primary schools
the expansion of nursery education (which fitted in with Keith Joseph’s theme of arresting the ‘cycle of deprivation’)
in secondary education, the right of local education authorities to decide what was best for their areas, while warning against making ‘irrevocable changes to any good school unless … the alternative is better’
raising the school leaving age to sixteen
encouraging direct grant schools and retaining private schools*
expanding higher and further education
holding an inquiry into teacher training
But those pledges did not reflect a clear philosophy. Different people and different groups within the Conservative Party favoured very different approaches to education, in particular to secondary education and the grammar schools. On the one hand, there were some Tories who had a commitment to comprehensive education which barely distinguished them from moderate socialists. On the other, the authors of the so-called Black Papers on education had started to spell out a radically different approach, based on discipline, choice and standards (including the retention of existing grammar schools with high standards).
On that first day at the department I brought with me a list of about fifteen points for action which I had written down over the weekend in an old exercise book. After enlarging upon them, I tore out the pages and gave them to Bill Pile. The most immediate action point was the withdrawal of Tony Crosland’s Circular 10/65, under which local authorities were required to submit plans for reorganizing secondary education on completely comprehensive lines, and Circular 10/66, issued the following year, which withheld capital funding from local education authorities that refused to go comprehensive.
The department must have known that this was in our manifesto – but apparently they thought that the policy could be watered down, or its implementation postponed. I, for my part, knew that the pledge to stop pressuring local authorities to go comprehensive was of great importance to our supporters, and that it was important to act speedily in order to end uncertainty. Consequently, even before I had given Bill Pile my fifteen points, I had told the press that I would immediately withdraw Labour’s Circulars. I even indicated that this would have happened by the time of the Queen’s Speech. The alarm this provoked seems to have made its way to No. 10, for I was reminded that I should have Cabinet’s agreement to the policy, though of course this was only a formality.
More seriously, I had not understood that the withdrawal of one Circular requires the issue